Menu

How to measure social media success

08/01/2018 | Digital Marketing | 5 minutes

Social media marketing needs to be a factor in your business’ overall marketing strategy. Whether
it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, your audience is likely to be using social media in some way. Putting yourself on these platforms is just
another way to get yourself in front of potential sales and can be a great way to generate and maintain relationships.

With the fast-paced world of social media, it can be difficult to reflect back on your posts and track their results. Analytics can help you to properly
measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and show you how to develop them.

In terms of measuring what you would classify as a success, you need to have clearly defined goals set out from the start. When we talk about goals at
Urban Element, we’re always making sure they’re SMART; specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound.

One of the most important things to determine is whether your goals are confined to just your social media accounts, or involve your whole digital presence.
Dependant on what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll need to develop and understand the metrics. Creating your measurements for success will make it
much easier to determine your social media effectiveness.

Social media analytics

Most social media platforms have their own form of internal analytics. These can tell you all sorts of information including post impressions, engagement
and clicks. However, there are loads of other tools that can give you in-depth analytics across your multiple channels.

If your goal is to drive traffic to your website, Google Analytics can show you the social contribution to your website’s views; as a whole and on individual
pages.

We use quite a lot of tools to track our social media accounts, including:

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is absolutely essential when you’re looking to measure the success of any marketing activities. It’s easily enough done on all your accounts.
Simply, take regular snapshots of the current numbers and averages. This will show you how far you’ve come after any given campaign or activity.